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Tree So Horny

Kyla — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 03:00:00 -0400

What you think about Fuck for Forest, a Berlin-based website that lets subscribers watch videos of environmental activists doing the nasty, depends in part on what you think about porn as a whole. If you think it’s liberating, empowering, and fun for the folks involved, then you can feel good about supporting an organization that channels its massive earning potential toward worthy antideforestation efforts—unlike regular internet porn, the dollars you spend aren’t paying for the gold plating on some smarmy webmaster’s hot tub.

Five Conversations About One Thing - Joe Kelly

Kyla — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500

Years ago, Joe Kelly noticed a Maidenform ad reading “Inner beauty only goes so far” on the side of a city bus, and was horrified to imagine one of his young daughters as the subject of it. As one of the founders, with wife Nancy Gruver, of New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams, an award-winning, youth-edited publication, Kelly was well aware that the relationships between girls and their fathers hold an importance that’s too often dismissed or overlooked.

Kiss Me, I'm a Fashionable Bigot

Kyla — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 03:00:00 -0400

Two years ago, the preppy mall staple Abercrombie & Fitch released a line of t-shirts that paired early 1900s–style caricatures of Chinese men (complete with coolie hats, big grins, and slanted eyes) with slogans like “Wong Brothers Laundry Service—Two Wongs Can Make It White” and “Wok-N-Bowl—Let the Good Times Roll—Chinese Food & Bowling.” The clothing chain then professed great surprise when Asian-American activists cried foul; A&F’s pr flack Hampton Carney told the San Francisco Chronicle, “We personally thought Asians would love this t-shirt.... We are truly and deeply sorry we’ve offended people.” As a result of continued protests, the shirts were eventually pulled from stores (and quickly became hot commodities on Ebay).

Beauty and the Feast

Kyla — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 00:00:00 -0500

The first thing you see is food. a breastlike dome of cake towers at the top of the ad, frosted pink with a raspberry on top. “It’s like dessert for your legs,” declares the text, and just in case this copy wasn’t clear, below it a pair of cellulite-free gams balances a bottle of Skintimate After-Shave Gel in lieu of icing.

Bodies of Work

Colin Sagan — Sun, 01 Jun 2003 03:00:00 -0400

“Analysis is hard, it’s complicated, and it disturbs the comfortable simplicity of familiar worldviews.” So writes Susan Bordo, professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky. And she should know: Her incisive writings on a wide variety of topics cut through thickets of controversy and rhetoric to produce a fine, elegant, and, above all, resonant analysis. On the intersection of psychology and culture at the nexus of the eating-disorder epidemic: “Families exist in cultural time and space.

Editors' Letter: Issue 10

Kyla — Tue, 01 Jun 1999 00:00:00 -0400

When we put this question into our reader survey, we expected a wide variety of responses. And we got them.  

“I write it/act in it”: 6 percent 
“I like to look at it”: 36 percent 

“It’s ok for other people, but it’s not my bag”: 30 percent 

“I don’t like it, but what other people do is their business”: 20 percent 

read more

Ten Things to Hate About Jane

Colin Sagan — Fri, 01 Jan 1999 02:00:00 -0500

When we heard that Jane Pratt, the former editor of Sassy—the sharp, celebrated teen mag that above all was absolutely unwilling to pull its readers into the spiral of insecurity and product consumption so endemic to all others in the genre—was launching a new grown-up glossy, we, along with other feminist pop culture junkies nationwide, squealed with excitement. Then Jane launched. And we weren’t excited anymore. Here’s why.

Mad As A Wet Hen #2

Kyla — Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500

“So now you can eat like one of the boys, but still look like one of the girls,” says the male voice-over touting Baked Lays potato chips while supermodels stuff their faces on screen. Eating is a masculine activity, while being looked at is feminine. But this old-hat belief is topped by the variation on Lays’s usual tag line: “Bet you can’t eat just one...bag.” The all-too-common binge/purge cycle of eating disorders is obliquely referenced, and even condoned. Yes, go ahead, says the ad, eat bags and bags and bags, and still stay thin. We’ll look the other way while you vomit.

Whee! #2

Kyla — Fri, 01 Mar 1996 00:00:00 -0500

Here’s to Roseanne’s succinct feminist history lesson that explains in pithy shorthand how historical power dynamics must affect the meaning that is made by a certain event or action: “Boys bullying girls is a step backward. Girls bullying boys is the future.”

Mad As A Wet Hen #1

Kyla — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

How about that new Taco Bell ad featuring 11-year-old boys on the beach ogling a shapely lifeguard as she consumes a quesadilla, twirling the cheese around her finger and sucking it off? Yeah, 18-year-old women exist only for the amusement of pubescent boys. And when the kid faints when he gets near her? Oh, we almost forgot-sexy is good, but too sexy is scary and dangerous.